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Are your CDs making you sleepy? Is digital perfection robbing your ears of the sonic richness that they deserve?
In other words, have you fallen prey at last to the mid-life crisis known as the hunger for vinyl'?
Remember those days of the virgin black discs as they slid voluptuously from their LP sleeves (themselves a thing of beauty and wonder of course)? Relive again the moments when you reverently placed that mystical plastic circle on your Garrard deck, ever so gently laid the automatic dust-collecting brush in the first hallowed groove and listened in awe to the hisses and crackles as the Shure stylus tracked along the lead-in. Experience once more the breathless wait for those first skin tingling chords from the Fender only to discover that you've left the deck set to 45rpm instead of 33 and a third!

Yes the LP collections that we had back in the days of real music, namely the 60's, 70's and 80's are now being hunted down like an Indiana Jones temple treasure. There are people who reckon that the warm colourful tones of an old LP far outdo the sanitised and clinical correctness of the silver disc in terms of pure musical enjoyment. And some point to the sheer breadth of choice available on old vinyl ; where else they ask can you find such gems as Sir Terry Wogan and the Black dyke Mills Band, William Shatner, The Chipmunks (on red see-though vinyl by the way), the speeches of JFK, The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah band and those truly appalling cheap cover versions of pop songs? Of course if such things are not to your taste, (and I can't imagine why not), you can always try to find the more commonplace items like original copies of Beatles records, early Beach Boys, Queen, 10CC, Floyd, Sabbath etc. Ah! But therein lies the problem: several million other people have the same idea and are looking for those albums too!
So - - that must-have copy of Dark Side of the Moon on Ebay that nut*rakcer24*' is offering could be the same one that nut*rakcer24*'bought himself earlier in the week, only to discover that it has more scratches and gouges on it than a 27 year old Tom-cat in heat and he is trying to offload it as fast as possible! In other words, be careful - -bargains are rarely that, and be aware that most of the good stuff is already in the hands of collectors and it's staying there.

What can be done then if the irresistible urge to embrace vinyl once more comes upon you? Well, it has been estimated that about one third of all LP's produced has ended

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